John Fowles

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Robert Fowles (31 March
1926 – 5 November 2005) was an
English novelist and essayist. In
2008, The Times newspaper
named Fowles among their list
of "The 50 greatest British
writers since 1945.
Life:
Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in
Essex, England, the son of Gladys
May Richards and Robert John
Fowles.Robert Fowles came from a
family of middle-class merchants of
London. Robert's father Reginald
was a partner of the firm Allen &
Wright, a tobacco importer.
Robert's mother died when he was 6
years old.
At age 26, after receiving legal
training, Robert enlisted in the
Honourable Artillery Company and
spent three years in the trenches of
Flanders during World War I
leaving him with memories that he
had for the rest of his life. Robert's
brother Jack died in the war,
leaving a widow and three children.
During 1920, the year Robert was
demobilized, his father Reginald
died. Robert became responsible for
five young half-siblings and the
children of his brother, and though
he had hoped to practice law, the
obligation of raising an extended
family forced him into the family
trade of tobacco importing.
Gladys Richards belonged to an Essex family
originally from London as well. The Richards
family moved to Westcliff-on-Sea during 1918,
as Spanish Flu swept through Europe, for
Essex was said to have a healthy climate.
Robert met Gladys Richards at a tennis club
in Westcliff-on-Sea during 1924. Though she
was ten years younger, and he in bad health
from the war, they were married a year later
on 18 June 1925. Nine months and two weeks
later Gladys gave birth to John Robert
Fowles.
Fowles spent his childhood attended
by his mother and by his cousin
Peggy Fowles, 18 years old at the time
of his birth, who was his nursemaid
and close companion for ten years.
Fowles attended Alleyn Court
Preparatory School. The work of
Richard Jefferies and his character
Bevis were Fowles's favorite books as
a child. He was an only child until he
was 16 years old.
During 1939, Fowles won a position at
Bedford School, a two-hour train
journey north of his home. His time at
Bedford coincided with the Second
World War. Fowles was a student at
Bedford until 1944. He became Head Boy
and was also an athletic standout: a
member of the rugby-football third
team, the Fives first team and captain of
the cricket team, for which he was
bowler.
After leaving Bedford School during
1944, Fowles enrolled in a Naval
Short Course at Edinburgh
University. During 1947, after
completing his military service,
Fowles entered New College, Oxford,
where he studied both French and
German, although he stopped
studying German and concentrated
on French for his BA.
Fowles was undergoing a political
transformation. Upon leaving the
marines he wrote, "I ... began to hate
what I was becoming in life—- a
British Establishment young hopeful.
I decided instead to become a sort of
anarchist."
It was also at Oxford that Fowles
first considered life as a writer,
particularly after reading
existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre
and Albert Camus. Though Fowles
did not identify as an existentialist,
their writing, like Fowles', was
motivated from a feeling that the
world was wrong.
Fowles spent his early adult life as a
teacher. His first year after Oxford
was spent at the University of
Poitiers. During 1951, Fowles became
an English master at the Anargyrios
and Korgialenios School of Spetses
on the Peloponnesian island of
Spetsai, a critical part of Fowles's
life, as the island would be where he
met his future wife Elizabeth
And the island would later serve as
the setting of his novel The Magus.
He wrote poems that he later
published, and became close to his
fellow exiles. But during 1953 Fowles
and the other masters at the school
were all dismissed for trying to
institute reforms, and Fowles
returned to England.
During late 1960, though he had already
drafted The Magus, Fowles began
working on The Collector. He finished
his first draft in a month, but spent more
than a year making revisions before
showing it to his agent. Michael S.
Howard, the publisher at Jonathan Cape
was enthusiastic about the manuscript.
The book was published during 1963 and
when the paperback rights
were sold in the spring of that year it
was "probably the highest price that
had hitherto been paid for a first
novel," according to Howard. The
success of his novel meant that
Fowles was able to stop teaching and
devote himself full-time to a literary
career. The Collector was also
optioned and became a film in 1965.
During 1965 Fowles left London,
moving to a farm, Underhill, in
Dorset, where the isolated farm
house became the model for "The
Dairy" in the book Fowles was then
writing, The French Lieutenant's
Woman (1969).
And during 1968 he and his wife
moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset,
where he lived in Belmont House,
also used as a setting for parts of The
French Lieutenant's Woman.
Fowles lived the rest of his life in
Lyme Regis. Fowles, with his second
wife Sarah by his side, died in
Axminster Hospital, 5 miles from
Lyme Regis on 5 November 2005.
Major Works
(1963) The Collector
(1964) The Aristos
(1965) The Magus (revised 1977)
(1969)
The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1973) Poems by John Fowles
(1974) The Ebony Tower
(1974) Shipwreck by John Fowles
(1977) Daniel Martin
(1978) Islands
(1979) The Tree
(1980) The Enigma of Stonehenge
(1982) A short history of Lyme Regis
(1982) Mantissa
(1985) A Maggot
(1985) Land (with Fay Godwin)
(1990) Lyme Regis Camera
(1998)
Wormholes - Essays and Occasional
Writings

(2003) The Journals – Volume 1

(2006) The Journals – Volume 2
The French Lieutenant's Woman
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969),
by John Fowles, is a period novel
inspired by the 1823 novel Ourika, by
Claire de Duras, which Fowles translated
to English during 1977 (and revised in
1994). He was a great aficionado of
Thomas Hardy, and, in particular,
likened his heroine, Sarah Woodruff, to
Tess Durbeyfield, the protagonist of
Hardy’s popular novel Tess of the
d'Urbervilles (1891).
During 1981, director Karel Reisz
and writer Harold Pinter adapted
the novel as an eponymous film;
During 2006, it was adapted for the
stage, by Mark Healy, in a version
which toured the UK that year. In
2005, the novel was chosen by TIME
magazine as one of the one hundred
best English-language novels from
1923 to present.
Plot summary:
The novel's protagonist is Sarah Woodruff,
the title Woman, also known by the nickname
of “Tragedy”, and by the unfortunate
nickname “The French Lieutenant’s
Woman”. She lives in the coastal town of
Lyme Regis, as a disgraced woman,
supposedly abandoned by a French naval
officer named Varguennes--married,
unknown to her, to another woman-- with
whom she had supposedly had an affair and
who had returned to France.
Sarah is portrayed ambiguously: is
she a genuine, ill-used woman? Is she
a sly, manipulative character using
her own self-pity to get Charles to
succumb to her? Is she merely a
victim of the notion of gender as
perceived by upper-middle-class
people of the 19th century?
She spends her limited time-off at the
Cobb [sea wall], staring at the sea.
One day, she is seen there by the
gentleman Charles Smithson and his
fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, the
shallow-minded daughter of a
wealthy tradesman. Ernestina tells
Charles something of Sarah’s story,
and he develops a strong curiosity
about her.
Eventually, he and she meet
clandestinely, during which times
Sarah tells Charles her history, and
asks for his support, mostly
emotional. Despite trying to remain
objective, Charles eventually sends
Sarah to Exeter, where he, during a
journey, cannot resist stopping in to
visit and see her.
At the time she has suffered an ankle
injury; he visits her alone and after
they have made love he realised that
she is, contrary to the rumours, a
virgin. Simultaneously, he learns that
his prospective inheritance from an
elder uncle is in jeopardy; the uncle
is engaged to a woman young enough
to bear him an heir.
From there, the novelist offers three
different endings for The French
Lieutenant’s Woman.
First ending: Charles marries Ernestina,
and their marriage is unhappy; Sarah’s
fate is unknown. Charles tells Ernestina
about an encounter with whom he
implies is the “French Lieutenant’s
Whore”, but elides the sordid details,
and the matter is ended. This ending,
however, might be dismissed as a
daydream, before the alternative events
of the subsequent meeting with Ernestina
are described.
Before the second- and third endings,
the narrator — whom the novelist
wants the reader to believe is John
Fowles, himself — appears as a
minor character sharing a train
carriage with Charles. He flips a coin
to determine the order in which he
will portray the two, other possible
endings, emphasising their equal
plausibility.
Second ending: Charles and Sarah become
intimate; he ends his engagement to
Ernestina, with unpleasant consequences. He
is disgraced, and his uncle marries, then
produces an heir. Sarah flees to London
without telling the enamoured Charles, who
searches for her for years, before finding her
living with several artists (likely the
Rossettis), enjoying an artistic, creative life.
He then sees he has fathered a child with her;
as a family, their future is open, with possible
reunion implied.
Third ending: the narrator re-
appears, standing outside the house
where the second ending occurred; at
the aftermath. He turns back his
pocket watch by fifteen minutes,
before leaving in his carriage. Events
are the same as in the second-ending
version, but, when Charles finds
Sarah again, in London, their
reunion is sour.
It is possible that their union was
childless; Sarah does not tell Charles
about one, and does not express interest
for continuing the relationship. He
leaves the house, deciding to return to
America, and sees the carriage, in which
the narrator was thought gone. Raising
the question: is Sarah a manipulating,
lying woman of few morals, exploiting
Charles’s obvious love to get what she
wants?
En route, Fowles the novelist
discourses upon the difficulties of
controlling the characters, and offers
analyses of differences in 19th-
century customs and class, the
theories of Charles Darwin, the
poetry of Matthew Arnold, Lord
Tennyson, and the literature of
Thomas Hardy.
He questions the role of the author —
when speaking of how the Charles
character “disobeys” his orders; the
characters have discrete lives of their
own in the novel. Philosophically,
Existentialism is mentioned several times
during the story, and in particular detail
at the end, after the portrayals of the
two, apparent, equally possible endings.